Hey everyone, hope you’re doing well. For some time, lemmy’s been struggling with donations. For all these years, the lemmy devs, like them or hate them; have been building the software that powers the entirety of the forumverse (that’s what i’m calling it, fuck you) so if you have even a dollar/euro/peso/whatever to give, it would be greatly appreciated (by the lemmy devs, and all instance admins!)
Good day to y’all :D
crossposted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:
Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto
If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name “Luigi”.
Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.
Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can’t go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.
Tell that to the .world users who wants dbzer0 gone because we don’t like copyright.
.world is the worst of the large activity groups, and it is worse because they are big enough they can start to manufacture concent that everyone else is bad, and then scare people off from the other instances. They to me feel like a group of people who are only mad at reddit because reddit hurt them, but have no issue with the fraimwork that made reddit reddit, and so are creating a distilled version of reddit.
It’s like how some people on Mastodon didn’t make new instances to break free from the corporate social media landscape, but to maybe become the next Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey.
It’s not about a statement or philosophy, it’s just to copy what worked previously without understanding why people want a federated, algorithm free system. It’s “Well if they can start a system that made them rich in 2005, maybe I can in 20XX.”
lemmy.world wants to be the default instance. Major players are wanting to boycott lemmy.ml and are actively cheering that it’s hurting the development team. They don’t even know what the service they use does or works. They just like the idea of hurting the development because 4 people were mean to them once.
They also seem to think that users from one instance going to another is bragading, except when they do it then they are just using the software as intended… and so there is no way to interact with them. Heck I have been told I am bregading a post… that is on the .ml instance
“People using the platform they signed up for is bragading.”
I was told that by a .world user yesterday, who expected a public forum where they were criticizing an instance for having its own rules, to not have the instance be able to see or defend themselves.
I have to wonder if this is a new trend. Is it going to be the new Tankie or Russian bot? "Anyone who disagress with me is a downvoting brigade!
I am currently wondering at what point will .world defederate from everyone, and just be a walled guarden, while also singing the praises of a decentralized federated platform. That seems to be the way its going right now, if an instance has different rules, or someone from an instance disagrees with them they start screaming that they need to defederate and that they are all bregading trolls.
If .world defederated, lemmy would be instantly 50% less toxic. Plus I’d have to see less genocide apologia, bootlicking for politicians would would gladly have them murdered if it meant it looked good in the polls, and just general “you see, i can fix the problem by being the problem!”